Cloak And Dagger
by featherxquill
Summary: I am the cloak and she is the dagger. Two viciously opposed entities locked in a furious, dangerous embrace. You cannot hate what you cannot also love. Ian Irvine's 'View From The Mirror' Quartet, Yalkara & Faelamor, femmeslash.
1. I

I

_Peel off the napkin,_

_O my enemy._

_Do I terrify?_

- Lady Lazarus

_I hated her the very moment I saw her. Everything I was not. Proud, bold, beautiful. She stood tall, skin like honey, dark hair a shimmering curtain down her back. A strong jaw, a simple white shift that both disguised and accentuated curves that were _perfect_. She wore no oils, powders or illusions, only three bold pieces of Aachan gold – torc, chain, bracelet – a perfect parody of asymmetrical Aachim design, powerful because she was so unmistakably Charon. She had come to oppose me, and I could see that radiant defiance in the burning carmine of her otherwise depthless eyes._

_Yalkara._

Faelamor.

They told me she was the greatest threat to our kind, before they sent me through, and that I was the only one strong enough to fight against her. It was like being reborn, coming though the void, birthed into a new world, naked and shivering, waiting to be warmed by the sun.

The very moment I saw her, she awed me. Tiny, as only the Faellem can be, but radiating power. Her hair was not blonde or white, but something without a name, her skin so very translucent that every subtle colour played upon it like ink on parchment; her transparency the very thing that made her colourful. She seemed to electrify the air around her; that hair a halo – her illusions rendered her faultless. Her catlike movements were always measured, those feline eyes liquid and impossible to read. The greatest illusionist on Santhenar, they called her. I knew it to be true.

_They measured it well. They knew we would be rivals, but I don't think even the Charon saw how deep the opposition would run. So deep, in fact, that our opposite ends were not so far away from each other at all._

_We pretended at first. There were not always battles. Although there was a relentless hunt for Shuthdar, it was a time of peace, or at least of whispered deceits rather than outright ones, so we played the game. But we were opposed in our very natures. Faellem and Charon; water and fire. I was as enamoured with life as only those of my species can be, appreciating everything: the dawn, the dew on a flower petal, the very smell of the air. She was smouldering embers, watching, biding her time, enigmatic. She desired wealth and grandeur, I only wanted power, and to do my duty - keeping Tallallame safe. My power was of the mind, and I was strongest where nature was at its greenest and fiercest. She could move the very rocks themselves when she chose to, and, like all her kind, was most at home in places where the earth was close to splitting apart. I drank only the natural waters and nectars of nature; she rather enjoyed the potency of wine._

If the Aachim are overly proud, the Faellem noble to the point of folly and the Old Human excessively mediocre, then the Charon could be said to feel too deeply, love too strongly; be too passionate.

The void had stripped away all of our humanity. When we followed the Way back to Aachan, we gained power, a world, and the chance to rediscover our culture. I had a duty, to oppose Faelamor, to keep my people alive, for none of us could believe that the Faellem would resist a device as powerful as the golden flute if it meant survival or extinction for their species. That duty I would fulfil, whatever the cost. And the cost turned out to be great for both of us.

_I could not stand it. Every moment of my existence, she was _there._ Always a step behind me or around the next corner, waiting. She learned my patterns fast, and she was a powerful scryer. She pierced through my illusions like soap bubbles; and I the most powerful illusionist on Santh, the leader of my kind. I was the best of them, and if the greatest of the Faellem could be so easily matched by one of the Charon, then our ancestors had been right, all those years ago._

_She was a shadow, larger and statelier, but always there, always with fingers reaching for me. I could do nothing, not walk or eat or drink or sleep without shrouding myself in an illusion that she could break at any moment. I was hunted, and I hated it. I hated her. She knew that to take the freedom of the Faellem was to take everything from them._

It became something of a game, or perhaps a challenge. She would conceal herself in new ways, inventive ways – a truly magnificent illusionist, and I would scry for her. I would search for her patterns and her auras, however concealed they were, and I would probe at those shields until they collapsed in on themselves, and her frustration flared into my mind like the stab of a knife. I often wondered whether she felt my glee on the other end. It was seldom, very seldom that I managed to find an opponent who was so very equal to me. Sometimes she concealed herself for weeks, months at a time, but I always found her.

And then a chill winter's night in Tiksi, and we built our tower of illusions on the rift.

There were whispers of her on the wind as I travelled, traces of her heading back toward Mirrilladell, but I could not pinpoint her. It had been months since I had known for sure, and I was growing restless with it, determined. Shuthdar had vanished once again, more beast than man, and I followed her fading scent in the hope that both of them were somehow headed to that vast, wooded place.

_Mirrilladell was on my horizon, the closest thing to a home I had on Santhenar. The Faellem are people of the forest. Our structures are basic, and rely upon the canopy of the trees, as our diet relies on what we can hunt and gather. Essentially, we are tribes-people, but we are not nomadic. I did what I had to do, followed the path of Shuthdar and his enemies, cloaking myself in such illusions that I was invisible. Sometimes I almost fooled myself that I didn't exist._

_But I never fooled her. Everywhere I walked, pursued; every illusion I cast, shattered. When aftersickness took me as it inevitably did, and my defences collapsed, I felt her presence laughing at me, mocking my weakness._

_I was euphoric on the return journey to Mirrilladell, having felt not a flicker of Yalkara's aura for two months, long enough that I felt almost free. I watched the sun set upon the hills from a tavern in Tiksi, having decided, just for a night, to take a bed and a bath – Old Human commodities that those of my kind usually do not bother with. _

_A dinner of roast meat and vegetables, a roaring fire in the hearth, a soft, high backed chair supporting my weight. The thought of home, of others of my kind, of being able to drop my defences, truly drop them, because there were others to do it, within the camp._

_It was that thought that weakened me, I believe, in this place of warmth and comfort. I was so very close, and surely she could not be scrying for me right at that very moment. The last time I had felt her presence was on the other side of the country. My illusions and protection crumbled around my shoulders and fell from my form like a shed skin._

I was so close that I felt it. Her aura blazed like a candle, it lit up the night. My head turned. I laughed, and it rumbled through the air with my Art, and straight at her, to her. I could not see her, but I felt despair, quickly followed by fury. She erupted in a swirl from the tavern door, out into the night where I stood.

"Yalkara!" Her arm stretched toward me and a wind I could not feel whipped the hair about her face into a frenzy. Fire in her eyes, her Art growing around her in an ethereal swirl of the night.

"Illusions, Faelamor." And I reached out my hand and ripped them away from her. Just a woman, then, but still magnificent in her ire.

I wanted to kill her. Oh, I have never wanted anything more. I wanted to reach into her soul and rip out the part of it that mocked me so. I wanted to hurt her, and I wanted her to beg me to make it stop.

_"Why must you do this!" I heard my voice break into a thousand pieces and attack her from all sides, saw her throw up her arms as though trying fight of a flock of attacking birds. Seeming to right herself against my onslaught, her face took up the strain of her Art, and she balled her hand into a fist and thrust it at me. I could not move. Pain clenched at my gut and I doubled over, illusions falling around me like so many flightless things. I fell to my knees, trying to draw a cloak of mist and darkness about myself, but she disbelieved it in an instant, lowering her balled fist as she stepped toward me, forcing me lower, down onto the hard ground._

_When at last she had me on my back and staring up at her, she smiled and released the hold. I could feel the aftersickness of months dragging at the back of my mind, wanting to surface, but I would not let it. I had not the strength for any more illusions. But oh, I still wanted to hurt her._

_"Do you relent, Faelamor?" There was a smirk upon her lips as she bent over me, stepping across my body with one heeled boot to stare down at my face. I could summon nothing, not force, not illusion, nothing to throw her, and she just stood there, mocking me with that enigmatic smile. My body ached with it, this desire to just knock her off her feet with something, wipe that smile from her face._

_I reached up and grabbed the hem of her cloak._

She kissed me. Hot and hard and angry, and the smile fell from my face as the certainty fell from my mind. What Art was this, what illusion? Her hands were pulling me against her, and she was so warm and tiny and strong. When I pulled away from her, confused and hot in the cheeks, she wore my smirk as though her kiss had stolen it. That ethereal hair fanned out against the stones.

Ah, my equal in every way - clever, cunning and powerful. "Illusions, Faelamor. Always illusions." I brought my knee down between her knees, drew it up, pushing her thighs apart. Her eyes widened, and the smirk switched faces again. "Is anything you do real?"

Her voice came out strangely when she spoke. "Sometimes I forget what is real, and what is not."

I leant against her, pressing her into the cold ground, hands against her shoulders. Lowered my face to within a breath of hers, whispered in her ear. "Well, I'm real, Faelamor, and no matter what illusions you hide in, I'll find you. Whether you like it or not." My hair made a curtain over our faces, my eyelids brushed her cheek.

Her whisper was guttural. "I hate you." And then lips were together again, bodies twisting, and heat, fingers pulling at fabric, touching warm, soft skin.

"I'll show you how real illusion can be."

She reached up and her fingers touched my temples, but seemed to probe right into my mind. She was searching for something, sinking deep and catching something within me, linking not from the front of the mind but in the depths, somewhere where we were not a different species at all.

It was the strongest link I had ever felt, and she drew on my power quickly. I could feel her weakness through it, feel the aftersickness lurking beneath her surface, but she was drawing the strength from me, whispering words against my skin and weaving a world around us. I had not the strength to disbelieve it, and in truth I did not want to. The stony ground turned to soft moss underneath us, and a warm, humid air twined about our limbs. When I looked up, it was to trees spiking up into the sky all around us, and inky heavens dotted with foreign constellations directly over our head, for we seemed to be in a clearing, and those stars dancing for an audience of two. This was a Faellem place; Tallallame, or as close to it as I would ever come. With our minds locked in this heady spin, it felt like home.

I'd lost all power, given it over to her, but we were too far gone to turn back. Clothes were shed in that balmy rainforest air. The stars shone on her translucent skin, and it flushed under my touch. I could feel her veins pulse beneath my fingertips.

And so we wrapped ourselves about each other in this reality of illusion, and whispered words that had everything to do with rivalry and nothing to do with hate.


	2. II

II

_Through portico of my elegant house you stalk  
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit  
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net  
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.  
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak  
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light  
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight  
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break._

- Conversation Among The Ruins

_"You are not interested in the Golden Flute." It was more a challenge than a question, for nothing she said was spoken softly. Yalkara was imperious, demanding, and these verbal duels characterised our meetings as much as did the furious union of lips, skin, fingers and wills._

_"Of course not." Months of the game, and she had found me again that night. It had become harder and harder to resist my desire for her, at the same time as it seemed to matter so much more that I triumph and elude her for long enough to make her quake and burn. I had given into to her Charon desire for decadence this time, and lay, tiny, in an opulent bed large enough for six of her kind. My hair fanned across her legs, head rested against her thigh, but our words were not the quiet kind. "I am Faellem, what need would I have for such a device?"_

_"Then why are you _here_?" I wasn't sure whether she meant here on Santhenar, or here with her. _

_I pushed my head back against her leg to look up and catch her eye, a smile twitching at my lips. "Do you wish I wasn't?" _

_She snorted, and there was laughter in it, but did not reply. No simple yes or no, for that one. I felt her fingers lift my head away from her, prompting me to sit, and she twisted and reached across to where her cloak lay discarded over a chair. Something metallic and cylindrical came out of the pocket, and with a few whispered words it opened in her palm. Instinctively, I shifted away. Flickers of colour lit her features, and caught the line of her chin and the curve of her cheek when she glanced up to pierce me with those dark eyes._

_"What is it?" A quaver in my voice._

_"The Mirror of Aachan, a powerful seeing device. I use this to pierce your illusions, and you are not even curious?" An elegant brow arched up toward her hairline. Something inside me froze. My eyes fell upon the tiny reflective sheet in her palm, and I saw in it a power that she had and I did not. There must have been a ravenous hunger in my eyes, for whatever she saw gave her cause to smirk triumphantly._

_"Noble Faellem, too powerful to need devices." Her voice dripped with sarcastic venom. _

_Only moments ago I had been smiling, but that benign contentment turned to ice with her words. How quickly warmth heated into anger. My voice was glacial. "If the need arose, I would do anything for my people, use any tool available, betray anyone. I am a leader. I cannot afford to be afraid."_

_Her eyes remained impassive, but the glass in her hand flickered blue against her cheek then went dark. For a moment she did not speak. _

"Well, I'm pleased we see it the same way."

The Mirror coiled in my hand like a dead leaf. How naive I had been. Ridiculously silly. We would always be rivals, but I had been prepared to trust her, to give myself up to this fierce, knife edged love that had taken hold of me, this thing of vicious words and biting teeth and pure, undiluted animal. There was nothing to tame the Faellem, no pretence at organised society, no lofty Aachim arrogance, no sullenness at mediocrity. Her heart was fierce and ruthless, and something in me had thought I had a place in it, but that died right then. Somehow, knowing I could never have it just made me want her more, so that I might take it from her when she was off her guard.

I let the mirror roll onto the table beside the bed, and moved against her once again. I claimed her lips in a brutal, dominant kiss, forcing her down against the soft quilts, and sought to claim a part of that heart for my own.

What did any of it matter, right then and there, as her fingers twined in my hair and I kissed her back with a passion I did not even know I possessed, when tongues warred together and loyalties were pledged and destroyed with caresses?

When people think of the events that will change their life, they think of gradual transformation, walking a path and enjoying the scenery as it blends progressively from forest to scrub to desert. Such fantasies are illusion. When things changed for me, it was not at all smooth. I tripped over myself and fell into a spiral that drew me down through forest and desert and into the frozen depths of the void before I had even become aware of what had happened.

In a way, everything changed when I met him.

My mood was black. I had no idea where she was, not when I scryed with the Mirror, or in other, more traditional ways. It was as if she had fled through the void to Tallallame. Nothing, not even a scent on the wind to follow. No traces if the aura of her art.

I scowled, sinking deeper into my seat and tapped my bracelet against the table moodily. I must have looked formidable, but he has told me since that he thought me beautiful even then. A large hand laid a goblet of wine on the table before me, and it was a moment before I looked up and realised he had seated himself at my table.

"They call you the Mistress of Deceits."

Old Human, but tall, with strong hands and jet black hair that hung around his shoulders in waves. He was clean-shaven, and his lips curled into a benign smile. His eyes were dark green, and his gaze intense.

"Do they? I can't imagine why." I heard something musical in my voice, flirtatious, and realised that the black mood was quite gone.

"Well, they call me the Recorder. That's not nearly as interesting." I felt myself smile, and a breath of laughter escaped my lips. "But my name is Gyllias, and the drink is for you." He gestured to it with his eyebrows, and I lifted the heavy pewter goblet and took a sip.

"Yalkara." I replied.

He smirked. "Well, now, they wouldn't call me the Recorder if I didn't know who I was looking at when I saw the only Charon woman on Santhenar, would they?"

"I suppose they wouldn't."

That was the first spin, and it was heady and sweet and as potent as the wine in my hand. I forgot all about her, and in my Charon way, I think I fell in love with him that night.

I coughed, and the aftersickness rose up my throat like a tidal wave. I forced it down again. Oh, this had cost me, and for what?

_She found me with a seeing device, pierced my illusions because I was really there, whole and unchanged beneath them, waiting to be found. So I used my Art in a different way, felt the air and the night around me, the grass under my bare feet, and _became _them. Only a Faellem could have done it, and I was the best of them. I did not just cloak myself, I became physically invisible. My body ceased to be anything but something that existed in a strange sort of way in my mind. I could not even feel it. I simply was, and merely with the force of my will I directed this strange, all-seeing mind about the place._

_I remained in that state for about two days before I could do it no longer. I fell back into that body like a stone, smashing my knees against rock and aching all over with the force of the Art I had worked, and fought back the aftersickness until even the repressing of it made me feel ill. I would find somewhere rich and green, somewhere naturally in tune with me, and there I would cast but the most basic of illusions and charms before I let it take me. I did not know if aftersickness could kill me, but I hoped not, because if so, this certainly would. _

_When I found such a place, I was shaking with the repression, shaking to my very bones. I felt brittle and weak, almost liquid. I stumbled drunkenly, made a pillow of the grass and leaves, then splashed upon the ground in a messy heap and let it wash over me._

I did not even search for her. Her dreams pierced my own. She writhed in agony inside my very mind. I had no idea how far away from each other we were, but she caught me in it, trapped me in her dream, twined me in that terrible thrall, and the aftersickness wrapped around my brain like tendrils from her own as if it were too much for her, and I felt myself writhe in my bed even though I could not wake, felt sheets sticking to me as I sweated coldly, but not even such a sensation could pull me from that iron grip in which she held me.

_This was too much. Too much for my tiny body, too much for a mind as sensitive as mine. I did not know I even _had_ the remnants of that link within me, but my feverish mental fingers gripped it like a lifeline and drew it taut between us._

Images were flitting through my mind like wraiths, feeble figures that barely lasted a second. Between these ghosts I caught glimpses of more solid entities, felt flickers of coherent but alien sensations and emotions – greenery, forest and a tiny frail body upon a thick bed of leaves; night and lifting a hand that wasn't there, that wasn't even a hand; panoramic vision that no eyes could see. Dizzying.

Colours and thoughts poured across the link as I opened it wider, needing to rid myself this toxin, needing to share it, and too ill to care what else was flowing across it. Hunting and scrying, that mirror in a large bronzed hand, flickers of a landscape arid and barren but that someone thought beautiful – not me, I hoped. Warmth, a goblet of wine, and a man, and something hot and sweet and heady that wasn't the wine. The man, it was the man, he had put something hot in her heart and she was gazing at him with something growing in her chest, and oh! I could not claw the vision away. She was laughing, and smiling, and his eyes twinkled, and something in my own chest smashed apart in that body that felt so very far away yet so acutely there, and I flung and flailed and burned, hot and white and more painful than a thousand aftersicknesses. Across the link I hurtled the only thing I knew that would hurt her more.

_Mariem._ It whipped across my mind like something venomous, searing me and burning that realisation into my very flesh. I saw the void, and that beautiful green land covered in cities, Faellem in a circle, and my people falling away into that teeming darkness. I screamed, though I'm sure it was only in my mind; recoiled violently. Mariem. Faellem. It burned me. I fought her viciously, tearing at the link, but she held on with all the force that was her will to live, and we twisted and pulled against each other, even then unable to let go.

It took me a long time to recover. Even when the aftersickness had gone I did not move. This was more than the repercussions of such a powerful Art, this was a Faellem in despair, and nothing could be more debilitating to one of us than a failure of mind and will.

_There was something hideous in what I had seen in her heart – it was stronger and more fierce than anything I possessed, and I knew without question that it was unbreakable, that it would only grow. Tears, hot and salty and hideously degrading stung at my cheeks, and I clawed them away with weak hands, hating myself for it, no, hating her, for how dare she fall in love with him. How dare she focus that Charon mind heart on someone else when she had pretended to give it to me. How dare she melt my icy Faellem heart with her Charon fire and then leave it lukewarm and weakened and wanting her, while she went off to love another._

It froze my insides to ice. The Mariem. The Faellem had betrayed us, cast us into the void to die for their own selfish gain, and our species had lost every scrap of what they once were in that vicious place, knowing only what we had once been called, and that we had somehow been betrayed. All the noble art we had once possessed, those vast glassy cities throbbing with creativity and life, shattered to pieces by their acts, reduced to beasts by that animalistic place. She had betrayed me by even _daring_ to mock me with that tranquil rainforest under the stars. She had known, she was one of them, the greatest of the species that only became great by murdering our people, and she pulled me against her and made my fierce Charon heart beat in time with hers. She had presumed to own what her people had once so cruelly cast aside, and I hated her for it with an ice in my veins that she put there herself.

Shuthdar was found, cornered. And when I made the Forbidding I did it with all the anger and hatred I could muster for Faelamor, and all the love for my people back on Aachan. The fire and the ice that had once been that cloak and dagger love of ours was what sealed the world from all these follies. We would have our world, and damn the all. No one would ever force us into the void again.

I took absolutely no pleasure from it, though I suppose I thought I would. Nothing was the same; everything was tainted by my bitterness. How dare she love him and not allow me to forget her. This one that now held me in his arms and tried to warm my heart of ice was failing miserably, and how could he not, for you cannot melt ice with coolness, and that is the warmest the Faellem will ever be. Only her Charon fire melted that frozen armour I wore, and nothing would ever be the same again.

_Nothing warmed me, not even what we created. Faellem pregnancies are blissfully short._

Too late I realised what a terrible mistake this Forbidding was. Too late I realised it for something brought on by anger, something unstable, something that had destroyed the balance between the worlds and would eventually threaten the existence of all three. It needed to be undone, but I did not know how.

I told him none of it, but he was there anyway, and I grew to love him more than life itself. He did not ask for answers I could not give, and I demanded of him nothing he could not do. His hands were large, strong, and he held me tightly and there was no rivalry in it at all, only devotion.

The Charon know everything about breeding. I felt myself conceive. I walked to the window, wrapping a robe about myself, and stared up through the glass at the full moon, peering back at me with its red and blotched dark side. I lay my hand against my belly and refused to allow myself to believe their superstitions.

"Laugh! I know what you left behind. I found it and I broke it, and all your hopes and dreams with it."

A/N: The poetry at the beginning of each chapter is Sylvia Plath. The last line of the fic is of course from 'The Tower On The Rift'


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